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Books in Brief: Fiction; You Say Potato, I Say Kartoffel

The unnamed narrator of the German novelist Uwe Timm's MIDSUMMER NIGHT (New Directions, $23.95) is a novelist with writer's block. So when he's asked to write a magazine article about potatoes, he accepts, hoping to shake his torpor. But his research trip from Munich to post-reunification Berlin, where he wants to retrieve a potato scholar's archive, is as bizarre as his subject is banal. Entering the former eastern sector, he is swindled by a hawker of fake leather jackets, abused by a cabby and given a really bad haircut. Timm's sendup of reunification is fun -- some walls, it seems, never come down -- but that's not his theme. He's more interested in exploring what happens when two opposing political cultures, both of which have stifled self-expression, are suddenly mixed. What results, if his portrait is any indication, is a restless flux -- a midsummer night's dream. This is a Berlin whose Reichstag Christo has just wrapped in a canvas cocoon and whose citizens, shaken up by the Zeitgeist, are reinventing themselves: a linguistics scholar is forging Russian Constructivist paintings; a husband has bidden goodbye to his wife and taken up with a djellaba-clad Bedouin. And as the increasingly befuddled narrator pursues his quest, the potato emerges as the symbol of this flux. How? Credit Timm's puckish conceptual artistry and his brewmeister style of letting a story ferment unhindered. ''Midsummer Night,'' as translated by Peter Tegel, is a picaresque comedy that is also, unobtrusively and astutely, a novel of ideas. Bill Christophersen